How to Start a New Garden Bed

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If you’re dealing with hard clay soil like we are, consider building raised beds. Raised beds come with several benefits. For those of us in northern climates, they heat up much faster than the surrounding soil so you can get working in your garden sooner. Depending on how high you make them, they can also reduce a lot of the bending you would do in a traditional garden bed at soil level. Raised beds also help define the garden area, providing visual interest in the yard, and they allow you to build a bed with the best growth medium (i.e. compost) in areas with poor soil.

When we first moved into the Suburban farmhouse, we built two very large raised beds which we simply subdivided with walkways. We then filled them with a combination of topsoil and well rotted compost after double digging the underlying clay. By the time we were done digging and moving all those wheelbarrow loads we were beat! If I had known then what I know now, I would have followed Charles Dowding’s method of no dig. 

To start a no dig garden bed, start by outlining the area you want it to cover. Do this with a hose, string, or simply in your head. Then cover the entire area with cardboard (what a great way to use all those empty Amazon boxes!). Make sure to extend the boxes slightly beyond the area you want to plant. This will work to keep grass and weeds from working their way into your garden. Be sure to cover everything. If you see grass through any gaps, it will grow into your beds and take over. Be sure to overlap the edges. 

Once your garden area is buried in a layer of cardboard, now is the time to place your raised bed boxes where you want them (assuming you are doing raised beds). As soon as everything is to your liking, start filling the area with well aged compost. If you’re using raised beds, fill them up to within an inch from the top. If you are gardening at ground level, add a 4-6 inch layer of compost on top of the cardboard. Don’t worry – the cardboard will break down over time so your plants will have enough root space. This is a great way to create a weed free garden bed in virtually no time at all.

Providing Structure in the Garden

Whether starting a new bed, or simply preparing an existing garden space for planting, we like to think about the “bones” of the garden. Bones are the elements that give the garden visual interest and some structure. They can include everything from walkways to trellises, raised beds to fencing. 

Some gardeners go all out with laying the bones of their garden space and as a result have beautiful spaces that invite the curious to come and explore. If I could have a “do over” I would certainly incorporate more points of interest in the garden and lay things out a bit differently than we did originally. That said, no matter the starting point, it is always possible to incorporate more and make improvements moving forward.

One of the most important elements are the walkways. It is important to define areas that will be available for heavy traffic – whether from daily harvesting and maintenance, or from wheelbarrow loads of mulch. In our vegetable garden we have two types of pathways. One is the primary traffic areas around the two large beds. These are paved with red pavers, and in less visible areas other odds and end pavers we had lying about. This was a huge improvement from the pea gravel we had previously. While the pea gravel was a great reuse of materials from the kids play area, we found that the wheelbarrow was hard to push and control leading to unnecessary frustration. So when we bought pavers for another project we purchased extra for the garden area. 

In the large beds, for years we defined the walkways with newspaper and straw. This worked for us for a long time, but was a challenge in the years where we were unable to find straw. Finally, last year we bit the bullet and built some walkways out of composite decking material. We wanted to keep things flexible so they are built in shorter sections that can be moved around within the beds or removed entirely. This makes it easier to spread compost, and provides us the flexibility to change the size of the inner beds moving forward.

Visual interest also comes from what you see when you look up in the garden. This is where trellises, fences, and even tomato cages come into play. Here at the Suburban Farmhouse we grow a fair number of tomatoes, so we have a lot of cages in relation to the size of the garden. This means they are highly visible structures. With this in mind, they should ideally be somewhat ornamental in addition to being practical. We’ve started changing out the traditional cone shaped tomato tower found at most gardening centers, with square tomato towers from Gardener’s Supply Company (https://www.gardeners.com). 

In addition to looking nicer than the cone shaped tomato cages (in our opinion anyway), we have found the square cages to be more stable. We get a fair amount of wind through our garden and gusts over 40 miles an hour on a fairly regular basis. When the tomatoes are heavy with fruit and full of leaves we’ve had problems with the cone shaped cages tipping over and uprooting the tomatoes in high winds. So far (knock on wood!), in the five years we’ve been using the square cages, none of them have fallen over. 

Trellises are another important vertical element. We’ve used various trellises for our cucumbers for years, finally settling on some leftover panels of fencing leaned up against the side of the house. We use sections of fence panels for our bean trellises as well. These were materials that we had on hand so we were able to put them to use at no additional cost. Since the fence material is an open square metal livestock fence it is fairly invisible, yet provides adequate support for heavy vines.

This year we are playing with trellising our squash as well. We have some old a-frames we built 20 years ago that we are moving into the squash bed to try. If this works, we will likely re-purpose the remaining fence panels into trellises.

Why trellis? In addition to providing visual interest, trellises and tomato cages help to keep the plants up off the ground, and thereby reduce the amount of damage done by bugs, birds, chipmunks, rabbits, and other garden critters looking to sample your buffet. Also, by lifting up the plants that have a vining habit (cucumbers, beans, squash, etc.) you open up more space to interplant other crops. By interplanting you can garden an area more intensively, increasing your garden yields, and also crowding out weeds in the process.

Vertical supports and points of interest are something you can add to the garden as it grows and you get a sense of what you will be planting in the years to come. The most important tip here is to start small and collect or build over time.  

-Kim